The doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to this: that the decisions of
the Pope on faith and morals, being divinely inspired and infallible, are,
when placed upon record, so much more holy Scripture. This infallibility
dogma has been a great source of mischief and of unbelief. It has
accomplished no good, but a great deal of harm. Some Roman theologians
claim that the Popes have _only once_, up to the present time, spoken with
the formalities necessary to make their utterances “_ex cathedra_” and
infallibly binding, and that was when Pius the Ninth, on December 8, 1854,
decreed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary; which, if true,
belongs to the realm of unpractical speculation. It was denied as heresy
by orthodox Catholics, including _fourteen Popes_, for a thousand years,
and is contrary to the well-nigh “unanimous consent of the fathers.” _See
Dr. Pusey, Letter 1, to Newman, pp. 72-286._ To use such an engine but
once in all the centuries, and then to accomplish so little, aside from
furnishing infidels with something to say, is much like constructing a
vessel of twenty thousand tons capacity to carry one man across the
Atlantic. There is such a thing as Parthenogenesis known in nature. The
Vatican decrees declare that the Christian religion came perfect from
God’s hands; that it is not like a human science, such as medicine or
mechanics, which can be improved or altered by the skill of man. In view
of this conceded fact we have no kind of use for the decree of Pius the
Ninth upon the “miraculous conception”—“Pope Pius decreed it.” Well, well,
if Christianity really stood in need of such a decree it would not have
been left off until December 8, 1854. It has been a bone for infidels to
contend over from that time to the present. The New Testament is not
responsible for it.
Men of sense, who are not already traditionized nor Christianized, find
facts enough in the line of papal bulls and decrees to disgust them so
thoroughly as to drive them at once to reject religion entirely. Sixtus
the V., in 1590, declared, by a perpetual decree, an edition of the
Vulgate, just then out, the sole authentic and standard text, to be
received as such under pain of excommunication. He also decreed that
future editions not conformed to it should have no credit nor authority.
But its errors were so numerous that it was immediately called in, and a
new Vulgate was published by Clement VIII., in 1592, differing, in several
thousand places, from the one of 1590. This last publication was also
issued under penalty of excommunication for any departure from it. So
Roman Catholic faith rests very largely upon the assumed authority of the
Pope, and this authority has often been exercised in the wrong, they
themselves being witnesses. This authority, opposed to human progress, has
been and is one of the greatest feeders to Atheism and infidelity. Mr.
Draper, in his work entitled “Conflict between Religion and Science,”
wishes his readers to understand that he uses the term Christianity in the
sense of Roman Catholicism. The entire work is one grand scientific effort
against popecraft and priestcraft. His work is well worth a reading; but
it is to be remembered by all who would do Mr. Draper justice that his
great antagonist is the Roman Catholic Church. Will she defend herself
against the charge of being in conflict with science? Is she in the way of
human progress? How does she compare with Protestants in morality and
virtue?
Let us give you a few figures, by the way of negative evidence, upon the
question of comparative morality, remembering that it is a sad necessity
of our nature to have to determine which of us has the least of moral
miseries in order that we may know which has the most of virtue. Let this
be as it may, these moral miseries show themselves under two principal
phases, acts of profligacy and acts of violence; corrupt manners and
assassinations. Here is what we read in Jonnes:
Assassinations And Attempts To Assassinate In Europe.
Protestant—Scotland, 1835, 1 for 270,000
Protestant—England, 1 for 178,000
Protestant—Low Countries, 1824, 1 for 163,000
Protestant—Prussia, 1824, 1 for 100,000
Catholic States—Austria, 1809, 1 for 57,000
Catholic—Spain, 1826, 1 for 4,113
Catholic—Naples, 1 for 2,750
Catholic—Roman States, 1 for 750
_Jonnes, vol. 2, p. 257._
Now, if we take the average, we have one assassination, or one attempt to
assassinate, for 180,222 inhabitants in the aggregate of the four
Protestant nations; and one assassination, or one attempt to assassinate,
for 16,153 inhabitants in the four Catholic nations; in other words,
eleven times more of these crimes among the Roman Catholic nations. The
contrast between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Spain is so
very striking, and is painted by a writer in such lively colors that one
is tempted to believe that the picture was intended to serve as a
demonstration.
“Spain is a dispossessed queen. For two hundred years and more diamonds
have been falling from her glittering crown. The source of her wealth,
well or ill-gotten, is exhausted forever. Her treasures are lost, her
colonies are gone; she is deprived of the prestige of that external
opulence which veiled, or, at least dissembled her real and utter poverty.
The nation is exhausted to such a degree, and has been so long unhappy,
that each individual feels but his own misery. His country has ceased to
exist for him. Even those time are gone when the guerillas called the
citizens to arms for the sole and generous purpose of vindicating the
national honor. The despondency and apathy of the nation are visible even
in the battles fought by the Spaniards among themselves in their civil
dissensions. They fight from habit, and discharge their muskets at their
countrymen because they can do nothing else, and because every shot from
their guns may bring them a piece of bread. A nation reduced to such a
state is low indeed; the chilliness of death is very near seizing upon its
extremities. What a length of time it will require to heal the wounds of
these populations, so brave and so devoted! How much gold, how much blood
have been lavished during the last seven years without an object, without
any conceived plan!
“What would Charles the Fifth say, if, rising from his grave he saw his
great and glorious Spain struggling thus miserably in dread uncertainty of
her future destinies? ‘Where are my colonies? Where are my Batavian
provinces? Where is my gigantic power, and the glory of Spain, which
resounded from one hemisphere to the other? What have you done with my
inheritance, ye cowardly and unskillful men? Where are my treasures; where
the victorious fleets that crossed the ocean to bring back in profusion to
my empire the gold and gems of the New World?’ The question naturally
arises, what can be the cause of so many evils? of such utter misery, such
extreme ignorance, such disgusting sloth?
“_Tyranny_, says the politician.
“_Catholicism_, says the Protestant.
“_The Inquisition_, adds the historian.
“But these three replies form but one; they are the three sides of a
prism, which, united, give the entire ray of truth. In truth, Catholicism
is the father, the Inquisition and tyranny the daughters. We are not the
first to pen these words; we only repeat what we have read in the lines we
are now going to submit to the perusal of our readers. It is sufficient
for us to have pointed out the connection of the different causes which
will be assigned by our authorities.
“That Catholicism produced the Inquisition, a tribunal of priests, judging
heretics, it is unnecessary to demonstrate, for the very nature of the
institution renders it evident. The ruling idea of Catholicism, the
principle of authority, was the germ of the Inquisition. It was impossible
that the Romish Church should not extend its principle to its penal code;
it does not doubt in matters of faith, neither does it doubt in criminal
matters. This is the reason why, in the church, the accused and the guilty
have but one and the same appellation. Whoever is arraigned at her
tribunal has heaven and earth against him; the interrogatory is already a
species of torture. When the church accuses, she seems already convinced;
all her efforts tend to extort the confession of the crime, which, in
virtue of her infallibility, she discovers in darkness; from this
anticipated conviction of the guilt of the accused are produced all those
ambushes and snares laid for the purpose of obtaining, by surprise, the
confession of the accused. The names of the witnesses are concealed or
falsified. Everywhere, in the most trifling details, it is strikingly
evident that, truth is on one side, and the demon on the other.” [See
Tardiff, pp. 139, 140.]
In the second place, that Catholicism has produced the Spanish absolutism
of the Catholic kings is sufficiently shown by the very name given to
these kings.
“Another no less deplorable consequence of the position of the clergy in
Spain and Portugal is, that they have no sooner confounded the cause of
religion with that of despotism, than this error, producing its
consequences, leads to a monstrous abuse of the word of God. Political
fury has invaded the pulpit and stained it with abject and sacrilegious
adulation.... The lips, whose mission is to speak peace, charity and
mutual love, have spoken the language of hatred and vengeance; horrible
vows, abominable threats in the presence of the tabernacles in which
abides the Son of Man, who sacrificed his life for the salvation of his
brethren.” [Affairs de Rome, pp. 250 to 254.]
“Spain, since Phillip II., has remained closed and uninfluenced by the
ordinary progress of the human mind elsewhere. The monkish and despotic
spirit has long preserved itself in the midst of ignorance, without,
indeed, acquiring strength from abroad, but at the same time without
permitting the intelligence of the nation to borrow foreign arms against
it.” [Idem, p. 53.]
We shall now see this Spanish Catholicism at work; for three centuries,
assisted by its worthy offspring, absolutism and the Inquisition, and at
every ruin, at every crime you meet with, if you ask who has done this,
the reply will assuredly be: the church of the Pope, the tyranny of the
Catholic kings, the Inquisition of the priests. To convince yourselves of
the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of
history, written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long
enjoyed unquestionable authority.
The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the
Catholic Inquisition. “Spain,” says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, “exterminated
them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. The Jews
and the Moors left it in turn, carrying with them, the former trade, the
latter agriculture, from this disinherited land, to which the New World,
to repair so many losses, vainly bequeathed her sterile treasures. And let
it not be said that Spain, in thus depriving herself of her most active
citizens, was not aware of the extent of her loss. All her historians
concur in the statement that in acting thus she sacrificed her temporal
interests to her religious convictions, and all are at a loss for words to
extol such a glorious sacrifice.
“In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently;
her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which
ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a
new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest
of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the
ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war with those ideas;
but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career
in which she can never stop.” [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]
“It required,” says M. Sismondi, “about one generation to accustom the
Spaniards to the sanguinary proceedings of the Inquisition, and to
fanaticise the people. This work, dictated by an infernal policy, was
scarcely accomplished, when Charles the Fifth began his reign. It was
probably the fatal spectacle of the auto-dä-fe that imparted to the
Spanish soldiers their ferocity, so remarkable during the whole of that
period, which before that time was so foreign to the national character.”
[Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated
Spain? THE INQUISITION. “To calculate,” says Liorente, secretary to the
Holy office, “the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give
palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation
of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the
Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of
the Jews, the conquered Moors and the baptized Moorish, we add about
500,000 families entirely destroyed by the executions of the Holy (?)
office, it will be proved beyond a doubt that had it not been for this
tribunal, and the influence of its maxims, Spain would possess 12,000,000
souls above her present population, supposed to amount to 11,000,000.”
[Liorente, vol. 4, p. 242.]
“The Inquisition ruined and branded with infamy more than 340,000 persons,
whose disgrace was reflected on their families, and who bequeathed only
opprobrium and misery to their children. Add to these more than 100,000
families who emigrated in order to escape from the blood-thirsty tribunal,
and it will be seen that the Inquisition has been the most active
instrument of the ruin of Spain. But the most disastrous of all the acts
which it occasioned was the expulsion of the Moors. If we add to those who
were banished from Spain the countless numbers who perished in the
insurrection of the sixteenth century, and the 800,000 Jews who left the
kingdom, it will be seen that the country lost in the course of a hundred
and twenty years about three millions of its most industrious
inhabitants.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 60, 61.]
“The advisors of Phillip III. said to him with affright: The houses are
falling in ruins, and none rebuild them; the inhabitants flee from the
country; villages are abandoned, fields left uncultivated, and churches
deserted. The Cortes in their turn said to him: if the evil is not
remedied, there will soon be no peasants left to till the ground, no
pilots to steer the ships; none will marry. The kingdom can not subsist
another century if a wholesome remedy be not found.”
What was the cause of the ignorance so general and so profound in Spain?
The Catholic Inquisition. “The commissaries of the Holy office received
orders to oppose the introduction of books written by the partisans of
modern philosophy, as reprobated by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and
ordered information to be given against persons known to be attached to
the principles of the insurrection.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 99.]
“Theological censures attacked even works on politics, and on natural,
civil and international law. The consequence is, that those appointed to
examine publications condemn and proscribe all works necessary for the
diffusion of knowledge among the Spaniards. The books that have been
published on mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy and several other
branches of science connected with those, are not treated with more
favor.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 420.] “The Inquisition is, perhaps, the most
active cause of that intellectual death that visited Spain at the close of
the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a
censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and
for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests,
their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to
321.] “Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the
clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the
answer is still, Catholic superstition!” [Napoleon Roussell.]
Infidels, who are noted leaders in “Free Thought,” as it is termed, are
invariably men whose religious education was in the religious literature
of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious
literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious
matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too
well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the
philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete
religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated,
and he is, at once, an infidel. No man is to blame for setting his face
like a flint against old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, and high-toned
Calvinism, nor for repudiating Papal and clerical authority known in the
Spanish Inquisition with all its horrible, unscriptural and ungodly
barbarities. But why it is that the infidel’s religious foot should set
away back yonder in the smoke of the dark ages, and his scientific foot
away down here with the railroad and telegraph, is rather difficult of
solution. It is rather amusing, since all well-educated American Catholics
condemn the Inquisition along with all the abominable cruelties of the
dark ages. And, as for Calvinism, there is not enough left for seed if it
was properly distributed—_it is old and thin._
“EVEN NOW ARE THERE MANY ANTI-CHRISTS.”
Col. Ingersoll says: “He (Paine) knew that every abuse had been embalmed
in scripture, that every outrage was in partnership with some holy text.”
If such was really true every rascal, scoundrel and villain should carry a
copy of the Bible. Do they? Are they in affinity with the Bible? Are they
even friendly to it? Things that are in affinity with each other are drawn
together. “A fellow feeling makes us very kind.” “By their fruits ye shall
know them.” “Birds of a feather flock together.”
Before the Bible went to the Sandwich Islands Col. Ingersoll would have
been hailed as a very proper object for a sumptuous feast. He would have
acted wisely in making his last will before starting, but now, since that
book has gone there which embalms every crime (?) he would find an asylum
of safety in which to repose his weary limbs. _How is this?_ Is every
outrage in partnership with some holy text? If so, the Bible would be just
one more reason for the continuance of cannibalism. The secret of Mr.
Ingersoll’s tirade upon the Bible may be accounted for when we measure the
magnitude of his infidelity. It is no shallow sort of unbelief, but, on
the contrary, it is deep seated, and one with the infidelity of his
excelling predecessors. Ingersoll intends to have no superior in
unbelief—you know he is ambitious. Let us give you a little speech that
was made, by one of his particular friends and co-laborers in this unholy
crusade, at Geneva, in 1868. Here it is:
“Brethren, I am come to announce unto you a new gospel, which must
penetrate to the very ends of the world. This gospel admits of no half
measures and hesitations. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by
a new one. The Lie must be stamped out and give way to truth.
“It is our mission to destroy the _Lie_; and to effect this, we must begin
at the very commencement. Now the beginning of all those lies which have
ground down this poor world in slavery is God. For many hundred years
monarchs and priests have inoculated the hearts and minds of mankind with
this notion of a God ruling over the world. They have also invented for
the people the notion of another world, in which their God is to punish
with eternal torture (not a Bible term) those who have refused to obey
their degrading laws here on earth. This God is nothing but the
personification of absolute tyranny, and has been invented with a view of
either frightening or alluring nine-tenths of the human race into
submission to the remaining tenth. If there were really a God, surely he
would use that lightning which he holds in his hand to destroy those
thrones, to the steps of which mankind is chained. He would assuredly use
it to overthrow those altars where the truth is hidden by clouds of lying
incense. Tear out of your hearts the belief in the existence of God; for
as long as an atom of that silly superstition remains in your minds you
will never know what freedom is.”
This has the genuine _Ingersoll ring_ upon the subject of “_Liberty of
Man, Woman and Child._” “When you have got rid of this belief in this
priest-begotten God, and when, moreover, you are convinced that your
existence, and that of the surrounding world, is due to the
_conglomeration of atoms_, in accordance with the law of gravity and
attraction, then, and then only, you will have accomplished the first
steps toward liberty, and will experience less difficulty in ridding your
minds of that second lie which tyranny has invented.
“The first lie is _God_. The second lie is _Right_. Might invented the
fiction of Right in order to insure and strengthen her reign; that Right
which she herself does not heed, and which only serves as a barrier
against any attacks which may be made by the trembling and stupid masses
of mankind.
“_Might_, my friends, forms the sole ground-work of society. Might makes
and unmakes laws, and that might should be in the hands of the majority.
It should be in the possession of those nine-tenths of the human race
whose immense power has been rendered subservient to the remaining tenth
by means of that lying fiction of _Right_, before which you are accustomed
to bow your heads and to drop your arms. Once penetrated with a clear
conviction of _your own might_, you will be able to destroy this _mere
notion of right_.
“And when you have freed your minds from the fear of a God, and from that
childish respect for _the fiction of Right_, then all the remaining chains
which bind you, and which are called _science, civilization, property,
marriage, morality and justice, will snap asunder like threads_.
“Let your own happiness be your only law. But in order to get this law
recognized, and to bring about the proper relations which should exist
between the majority and minority of mankind, you must destroy everything
which exists in the shape of state or social organization. So educate
yourselves and your children that, when the great moment for constituting
the new world arrives, your eyes may not be blinded and deceived by the
falsehoods of the tyrants of throne and altar.
“Our first work must be destruction and annihilation of everything as it
now exists. You must accustom yourselves to destroy everything, the good
with the bad; for if but an atom of this world remains the new will never
be created.
“According to the priests’ fables, in days of old, a deluge destroyed all
mankind, but their God especially saved Noah in order that the seeds of
tyranny and falsehoods might be perpetuated in the new world. When you
once begin your work of destruction, and when the floods of enslaved
masses of the people rise and engulph temples and palaces, then take heed
that no ark be allowed to rescue any atom of this old world which we
consecrate to destruction.”
_A representative of the kingdom of darkness._
“Destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they know
not.”